This blog is to encorporate discussions on Lost Continents, Catastrophism, The origin of Modern Humans and the Out of Africa theory, Genetics and Human Diversity, The Origin and Spread of Civilization and Cultural Diffusion across the face of the Globe.

Deluge of Atlantis

Deluge of Atlantis

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Christmas Letter on Atlantis #2

I also received this other message forewarding a letter to Scientific American, and I also thought it was worth publishing:

Can science survive scandal? Of course it can. But can it survive ego?

Is ridicule a part of scientific method? Certainly not, but when a scientist will not investigate ruins in the Bahamas because of its association with the "A" word, something is definitely "rotten" in the land of science. Like "Clovis First," proof to change things would remain impossible to find if scientists, for fear of retribution, never looked.

A few years ago, Michael Shermer wrote a short piece in this esteemed journal decrying the proliferation of locations for Plato's lost island (October 2004, p. 42). In that commentary, Mr. Shermer said, "What if Plato made up the story for mythic purposes? He did."

No discussion. No evidence or proof. Merely conjecture and bald affirmation.

While I'm sure Mr. Shermer did not interview the great Greek philosopher, the fact that he treats his own assumption as truth begs an argument to ignorance. The lack of evidence to the contrary does not disprove anything. And his assumption that his theory is truth without iron clad proof, only feeds the tendency to ridicule those who might more seriously investigate the topic.

Was Atlantis a real place? We don't know. Contrary to those who use ridicule instead of reason, we need to remain open to all possibilities, lest we fall into the trap of "Clovis First" style ego.

Ridicule may feed ego, but it does not serve science well.

My own meager research has turned up three items of scientific evidence which coincide with Plato's approximate date for the demise of Atlantis. Each of these empirical facts is compatible with the Atlantis event, though they may belong to something entirely unrelated. But the coincidence may be cause-and-effect, rather than accidental.

One piece of evidence is the abrupt end to the Younger Dryas (nominally 9620 BCE). Another is the moderately large volcanic trace in the Greenland ice cores for 9620.77 BCE. Could a cold-water cap on the ocean's thermohaline circulation have been disrupted by the mega-tsunami created by the massive tectonic subsidence of a large island? Could such a collapse have generated volcanic events? And could such collapse have been produced by elastic glacial isostatic adjustment resulting from massive crustal rebound on opposite sides of that location (Europe and America)?

The third piece of evidence is the weakest and certainly needs corroboration as a proxy for an actual event, but it is potentially the most exciting. At the edge of noise in the data for sea level change since the last Ice Age is a blip that could mean nothing. But it's coincidence with the abrupt end of the Younger Dryas could be the "smoking gun" in the death of Atlantis, if that lost island ever did exist.

This data suggests that there was roughly a two-meter drop in sea levels worldwide. At any other point on the graph, this blip could easily have been dismissed, but its coincidence with Plato's date makes at least one researcher a little curious.

Plato's location for Atlantis is at least marginally compatible with geological science. Most mountains are formed near tectonic boundaries. Mountains formed in the ocean sometimes become islands. Plato did not know that the Africa-Eurasia tectonic plate boundary ran right through his location for Atlantis. Another accident? Perhaps. The abrupt shift in the direction of plate boundary with the formation of the Terceira Ridge, some 36 Mya, may indicate a change in the Africa's Euler pole with respect to the Eurasia. Was it Africa's loss of Arabia, or a suddenly incompressible orogenic belt in the West creating new stresses across all of the Africa?

A two-meter drop in sea level is compatible with an Atlantis-sized landmass subsiding a thousand meters someplace in the oceans of Earth. Prove it? What a delicious challenge. But who would fund such a blasphemous idea?

Chapter Twelve Deep-Sea Corals: New Insights to Paleoceanography

Locations of dredged deepsea corals: the red circle shows the area pertinent to Atlantis
(old shoreline andislands off to the West) ALL of these locations are too far down for corals
to grow in more modern times. Muck and Zhirov both quote other asuthorities on this
problem. I find the fact that they seem to form a straight-line shoreline in the "Atlantis"
area to be INTENSELY interesting!

Examples of some of the corals indicated at some sites on the map.

Sealevel rise and fall, and deposition at ocean depths, during the latest Pleistocene, from the same article.

4 comments:

In this case I don't think you can even call that a coincidence unless you are a pretty well prejudiced type in the first place. Having all of these things come together this way does not seem to me as even close to coincidental.

In the case of theMid-Atlantic coral reefs, it does look to me as if they are arranged in clearly continuous lines and they wold seem to be indicating a former coastline. There just isn't anything in that area in more recent times to create the effect of a coastline, I think we have a clear instance here of the "Ghost" of a former landmass situated between these coasts, and now vanished. And these coastlines have a strong resemblance to the indicated landmass described under "Surveys of Atlantis" posted earlier in this blog.

I was doing a search online as research for a new book and came across this page. The large block of text at the top of this page looked oddly familiar. The more I read, the more it seemed like something with which I was intimately familiar.

Ever since I wrote that letter, I've wondered what the editors at Scientific American thought of it. I wasn't sure if they even published it. And I'm curious how it found its way here. A pleasant surprise, indeed, that someone found it interesting enough to publish.

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